Is Mining on ASICs Worth It? - Mining Adventure Part 3
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,884 words · ~9 min read
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so while it used to be possible to mine
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for bitcoins on your old laptop
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due to the constantly increasing difficulty it's no longer practical on
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mortal computers not even with multiple high performance graphics cards
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so then how do you do it allow me to introduce
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the bitmain antminer s9
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a bare bones computer of sorts except it has no
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display output no way to plug in a keyboard and it only does one thing mine
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sha-256 cryptocurrencies like bitcoin
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oh and we've actually also got an l3
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plus you want to open that one up Jake which does script coins like litecoin
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and a d3 which mines x11 cryptocurrencies like dash
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so the goal today is to find out if these things
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are worth it and no austin that is not trademarked i
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can say it
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so if you've seen part two of mining adventure already you should have a
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pretty good idea of what a fairly efficient GPU mining setup looks like
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but even that is nothing compared to an
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asic miner for example the Radeon hd
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7970 was released in 2012 and mined
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bitcoin at an efficiency of about 4 mega hash per watt so ignoring the few
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companies that never really shipped an end user product in late 2012 avalon
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released the avalon 1 an asic miner that
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did an at the time astonishing
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165 mega hash per watt a huge bump over
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GPU mining so how could they possibly achieve this
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well graphics cards and cpus are designed to
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be able to process a huge range of
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different calculations which is what makes them incredibly useful in our
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everyday devices this versatility is great
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but it limits their ability to do one thing
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really really fast so application
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specific integrated circuits or asics
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these are as the name implies designed
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and purpose built to do just
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one thing and while that might not make sense for your gaming rig for a bitcoin
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miner that only needs to run one specific formula it is a godsend
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at least for the people who own them because of the nature of
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cryptocurrencies the increase in overall
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hashing power in the network that's caused by a massive influx of
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specialized mining hardware is a big part of what made bitcoin's difficulty
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go up even further and i mean way up so when the
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avalon one came out bitcoin difficulty was at around 3 million by the same time
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the following year it was 600 million so if you fast forward to
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2017 there are a bunch of players in the asic
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market including bitmain whose hardware we have with us today inno silicon and
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by call thanks to whom bitcoin difficulty has reached a whopping 2
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trillion so all the folks out there running gpus for mining
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those guys are focused on alt coins like what we showed in part two so options
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like monero z cash and ethereum are all
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popular at this time by the way huge shout out to marshall at
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ogbtc on twitter and francisco over at
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byvm.net who helped hook us up with the antminer s9 the l3 plus and the d3 that
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we're taking a look at today so let's crack the d3 open here not so much for
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the warranty sticker we'll just uh put that
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right there i mean what else would we do with a multi thousand dollar specialized
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computer that's out of stock quite literally everywhere um i mean as a
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general rule machines that does this not slide out ah it was the wrong way dang
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it i called it hold on i'll just go you know we have
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pokey with this there you go as a general rule machines that
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essentially print money are in pretty high demand so unless you've got friends
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in high or low places they're mostly obtained by
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pre-order and the problem with that is that the wait lists can be as long as several
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months meaning that by the time they arrive they might not even be profitable
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anymore and that's a really relevant point here because this d3 miner now
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makes barely five to ten dollars a day
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before electricity costs while drawing a
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massive 1200 watts from the wall by
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default when these things were announced people were buying them left and right with
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dreams of making their money back in a week and then it's just pure profit from
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there on they definitely didn't learn from the
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effects of early asic miners on the bitcoin difficulty curve which naturally
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went way up so now that it's open then let's let's
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have a look at what's actually going on here so the d3 unit has three of these
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hashing boards each containing
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uh hold on so 50
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and i guess it would probably be the same on the other no it's just one side it is just one second oh wow so you
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think that's both sides from both sides wow cool
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so sorry yeah 50 asics they're held in
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place by an aluminum case then which doubles as sort of a wind tunnel with
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these high airflow fans on either side so most of the mass of this thing is
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actually just the glued on heatsinks for each chip so
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if we just plug back in the hashing boards to the
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controller here
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being very careful of course don't worry i got this
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and then connect this wiring to our controller here which by the way see
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this guy right here is a mini Linux computer
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and then we wire up a power supply we got one yeah here we go here's a power
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supply we should be pretty much ready to mine right i think so
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i mean we should probably put this cover back yeah yeah okay maybe finish pouring
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these back in yeah we'll be back in a minute
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okay i know you really like dropping things but it'd be good
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if you didn't drop them i'm not gonna drop them i don't trust you
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so you can actually use a regular computer power supply
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but with how short the supply of those is these days
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in many cases people end up using
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these mining specific ones so the only real
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difference is just that it only outputs 12 volt and then it just has a whack ton
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of 6 pin pci express connectors also because it's not designed for
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consumer use the word on the street there
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is that they are pretty loud
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so you need a network connection because your miner
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needs to be able to find and submit
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any work that it needs to do okay here we go
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that would sound too bad that's not too bad that's fine yeah
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just give it a second don't be fooled my friend it gets worse
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much much worse oh
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oh oh such a great noise
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so um here just like with uh blowing matron from
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one of our recent videos i wouldn't recommend getting any
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bananas or fingers anywhere near these things
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so at this point with all three of them plugged in
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updated and mining at current profitability levels
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we can see the s9 making about 33 bucks a day the l3 plus
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about 50 in a day and the d3 well the
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efficiency is pretty poor as we noted earlier at about nine dollars a day so
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we're gonna come back in a week and see what we've been able to mine
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okay so we're back again it's been about 16
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days since we installed the asics in the
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the empty not to mention not heated room over here
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and we're actually are you pulling up the pool statistics now
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okay cool our s9 has been mining a fork
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of bitcoin known as bitcoin cash and has
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been earning actually over our estimated amount about 30 to 46
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per day after our power is accounted for during
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this period so if profit were to maintain like this
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we'll be able to pay back the s9 at 2500
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in about two and a half months not too shabby
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with that said if you were looking to pick one up for yourself bit main isn't
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even accepting pre-orders as of when we were filming this and we've been seeing
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them priced at over 5000 us dollars on
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the second hand market the l3 plus averaged about 13 a day
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after power giving us around an eight-month roi time
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definitely worse than the former even if you are overpaying leaving us with the
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d3 which Jake actually found a custom
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firmware that allows it to draw 900 watts instead of the stock 1200 watts at
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about the same hash rate so we've been earning an average of seven dollars a
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day after power giving us an roi time of just over seven months that's actually
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better than the l3 plus since it costs less though
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i wouldn't recommend picking up a ton of d3s since x11 miners are nowhere near as
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far into their development as bitcoin and litecoin a6 and as such are likely
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to see big improvements in efficiency as time goes on driving up the difficulty
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curve so then in a nutshell
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at the right pricing an asic miner takes up less space and can yield better roi
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time with less software hassle and no
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construction time compared to GPU mining
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but it comes with higher risk worst case scenario gpus can be resold
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for some fraction of what you paid but since an asic miner has no value outside
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of mining the specific cryptocurrencies it's optimized for when the
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profitability is gone it just becomes an expensive paperweight
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